Poet Jackie Kay on Adoption, Identity and the Long Search for Belonging

0:04Jackie Kay:Hello, welcome to a new episode of Homing. I'm Matt Gibbard. Today's guest is Jackie Kay, a poet and novelist who was previously the national poet of Scotland, a role known as the macker. Jackie was adopted as a baby by a white Scottish couple, and she grew up in suburban Glasgow. Throughout her life, she's explored questions of identity, belonging, and family, themes that run through some of the most celebrated writing of the past 40 years. In this conversation, we explore how the love that Jackie experienced from her adoptive parents helped her navigate racism, what it feels like when people question your right to belong, and whether it's ever possible to feel completely at home in yourself.

0:47Jackie Kay:I'd never met Jackie before this. Parts of her story I found very difficult to hear, quite emotional. but she's also one of the warmest and funniest people I've had the pleasure of talking to. So I really enjoyed this and I hope you enjoy it too.

1:05So Jackie, I always start with the same question which is how do you define the word home?

1:12Jackie Kay:Because everyone has a different view on this word so I'd love to get yours. I'm intrigued. Well for me the way that I define home changes depending on my mood and how I'm feeling. Sometimes it's a place where I actually live, it's my house, it's where I come back to, it's where I feel comfortable, it's where I feel I can be completely myself. Sometimes it's my childhood home that I grew up in in Glasgow, sometimes it's actually my city Glasgow itself going home to Glasgow, I'll say. But now all of that and the notion of home has changed quite dramatically since my mother, my father and my brother, who all lived in Glasgow until not that long ago, all died.

1:53So my sense of the city being home and the childhood home that they were still in has all been quite ruptured. So home is a concept as well as a place. It's a state of mind as well as an emotion it's a physical building as well as an abstract set of emotions including nostalgia sentiment all sorts of things what a brilliant answer yeah I completely agree with that I'm

2:23Jackie Kay:sorry to hear about your family bereavement does that suggest that also home is found in other people as well in family members and friends do you think yeah I think that home is definitely to do with what people give to each other. And I think that that's proven when people are made homeless suddenly through earthquakes or disasters or through war, when they have to flee their homes and set up makeshift tents around the world, that they actually will find a way to create a sense of home. And a lot of that will come from each other, from people in a similar plight, from each other, from their immediate family, from how people cope.

3:04with disaster. So to me, my, you know, living in a house that has running water, that has central heating, that is safe and protected is a huge luxury. And I never stopped thinking about that.

3:18Jackie Kay:So could you tell me a bit about your family home growing up and what that was like? I mean, some people listening will be familiar with you and your backstory, but others won't be. So, you know just be curious if you could just put a bit of colour around what your upbringing was like. Yes absolutely well first of all I was adopted so the home that I was taken to was my first home I was adopted at five months old and brought from Edinburgh to Glasgow and to suburban part of Glasgow called Bishop Briggs in North Glasgow and my parents had this Lawrence house a bit similar to wimpy houses and I kind of but my mum always liked to be sure that it wasn't wimpy it was Lauren's and she was annoyed if I ever confused the two Bishop Briggs itself is an area unkind people would call it Spam Valley because the people living in Bishop Briggs were so conscious to buy these wee Lauren houses that they had to live off Spam all the time Bishop Briggs punters got very offended at the term Spam Valley but I kind of liked it because I was a kind of you know a rebel so yeah we had a two-bedroomed house a living room it was really really small house a kitchen a driveway it was a very small house but not small compared to if you're all crammed into a tenement and not small compared to all sorts of other places my dad who was a working class boy but a scholarship boy who'd gone to a famous kind of Glasgow school Alan Glens on the scholarship had come to Bishop Briggs as a boy from his tenement in Tunhied and he was really enchanted with Bishop Briggs so he just he was just made up and he never wanted to move that from that house and he never did.

5:01My mum always wanted to move from the house and was annoyed at the house in all sorts of different ways so she was always I spent half my childhood with her looking in the estate agent windows at fantasy houses with bay windows and in fact I wrote a poem about it called Windows Lakes where we're appearing in this estate agent in Windermere and she's going look at that I've always fancied a house with bay windows a cushion and no bay windows she had all these different fantasy houses so I like that too I grew up in an actual house but also with my mum's imaginative ideas of what home could be.

5:36Jackie Kay:That's really nice I love that and what sort of atmosphere was it in the home I mean what kind of atmosphere would you say your parents created there? Well they were really really great fun people they were both really into music and into song in fact they sang to communicate to each other just as much as they spoke so they would always riff off different songs all the time they had these party socials in our house they were both members of the communist party so they would have party socials where people would arrive the fiver in the bucket comrade and then put the fiver in the bucket and then they'd come and everybody would be like one singer one song and everybody would get really uh involved and sing their songs and do their party pieces and this small living room i mean god knows how we fitted so many people in but we just did we just burst into life and i'm always running into people even now that were at these party socials because they were quite kind of famous you know people loved them and they all loved trekking out to Bishop Briggs.

6:37Jackie Kay:So interesting and when it wasn't a sort of you know the site of a big party was it also a kind of quiet place was it also a place that you could find some refuge in some way if you needed to? I never found it quiet enough because it was so small I shared a room with my brother who was quite loud and I mean he was silent he didn't speak but when he spoke it was really loud and I shared a room with him till I was nine and we shared bunk beds and that was always really difficult actually he was very very messy and I'm I'm not and he quite enjoyed kind of like messing I try and keep my things neat and he quite enjoyed pulling the drawer open and throwing all my things onto the floor and and things like that or setting traps for me as I came in the door so you come in the bedroom door and he set a big heavy dictionary and as you went pushed open the door the dictionary would fall in your head and then he'd go swat and he took great pleasure out of that and or he'd wake you he'd lean from the top bunk bed in the morning and spit on you in the morning to wake you up things like that so it was really quite a grotesque thing and one morning I was awake ready for him and I saw the arm coming down and I pulled him on the floor and he fell on the floor and hurt himself and I got into trouble so that was, yeah he wasn't quiet, my dad wasn't quiet he had a very very loud speaking voice and he was always on the phone in the hall, which was in the hall that led directly up to the bedrooms to comrades and he'd always be using the word comrades in the opposite way to what you'd expect it to be used, look here comrades you said you'd do this so I thought comrades, is comrades a friendly word or is it not, I don't know and the only time that there was peace in the house was when it was just me and my mum She was really quiet to be with and we kind of often draw and read together and things like that.

8:32But it was still a really great house to grow up in. And all my friends loved being in my house better than their own. They would flock to my house. They'd flock to my parents. All of them wanted my parents rather than their own. So I was very, very, very proud of them. And they often had people come to stay from all over the world. So you'd come down the stairs in the morning and you'd find somebody from Sri Lanka or Nigeria lying in your living room floor. And that was quite exciting too, because I grew up in an old white part of Glasgow. And, you know, my original father was from Nigeria and my mother was from the Highlands.

9:06But both my parents were white Scottish people. And so it was quite exciting to get different people of different colours, sometimes staying in the house. My brother was also the same colour as me, though. They adopted him first and they got me to keep him company, even though he wasn't my biological brother. was a kind of similar colour so that was quite forward thinking for the late 1950s.

9:30Jackie Kay:Well very much so and so on that was there a particular moment where you realised I've got a different skin colour to my parents? Yeah I think these things are so subluminable for so long and so subconscious and when you do realise you do a lot of hindsight too you think oh that's why this and that's why that and there's a lot of kind of catching up because race is a state of consciousness but the consciousness is incremental it doesn't come in a big bang moment but the moment the big bang moment I do remember most vividly was when I was seven and my mum and I were watching a cowboy and Indian film and I noticed that the Indians were the same colour as me and that my mum wasn't and so I asked her why why wasn't she the same colours me and she said because you're adopted and I said what does adopted mean and my brother laughed me don't you know what adoption means I can't believe you don't know what adoption means he was sitting finding the whole thing really hilarious and I said no I don't know and my mum said it means I'm not your real mum and then I was really confused by not being a real mum and that really upset me I found it really upsetting the thing I was upset about is the idea that she wasn't my real mum.

10:42I actually thought that meant that she wasn't real at seven, that something was going to happen to her and that she was going to disappear in a puff of smoke or something. So I was really afraid by it and upset. And she said, your real mother couldn't keep you, but I chose you and you were picked. You were chosen, she said. Other people had to take what they got, but you were chosen. And she said, but your dad and I love you more than all the tea in china more than all the waves in the ocean and will love you till all the seas run dry

11:15Jackie Kay:that's really really beautiful isn't it god so touching what did that looking back on it now what did that moment because you were seven right when you had that moment you talked about there what did that do to your sense of home do you think i think it made things feel a bit more shaky you know if my mum went up on the ladder to put a light bulb in i'd worry that she was going to fall off the ladder and die you know it was quite I was quite um imaginative and also she didn't keep very well so from when I was about nine and my brother and I always thought something was going to go wrong with her I think perhaps when you're adopted that is you do have a stronger sense of things possibly being taken away or things abruptly changing and because there's nobody at least there wasn't then talking to you properly about these issues of of adoption you're left with a lot of it in your mind even though my mum was actually very open and talked about adoption much much more than my dad wanted her to because my dad didn't want us to talk about adoption he just wanted us to get on with being a family and he resented other people even mentioning it you know he was always saying to me things like you know there's a Scottish writer called Candia McWilliam that wrote a wonderful memoir you might be interested in talking to her actually but she he said he read one day in the paper that she's adopted and he said have you seen that Candia mcwilliams adopted and i said yes well she does need a lot about it all the time

12:49Jackie Kay:so i'm curious as to how what was life like for you then outside the family unit because was presumably glasgow was predominantly white at that time did you and your brother feel like you fitted in at school and so on? No we didn't feel we fitted in at school at all at primary school and we got a lot of racism I mean really a lot at primary school. One boy was expelled from school for the racism he did to me and two of them were given the belt in front of me. The headmaster brought me down to see them being given the belt and he thought that would be good for me it wasn't. How did that feel? Oh terrible terrible you know but they had been you know waiting for me for three weeks at the school gate and shoving mud into my mouth they put mud into these bubblegum wrappers then make them back up into looking like they look like bubblegum and then hold me down and shove mud into my house and say that's what you should have because you're from a mud hut and so it was really quite intense and I didn't tell my parents about it actually for ages because I always thought that they would get hurt by it so I used to try and just deal with things on my own until it came to a point when I had to I had to tell them because the thing that people often don't talk about about racism is that for white people that love black people racism hurts them too that's an interesting an interesting thing but anyway as soon as they did find out they were right down at the school and they were often down at the school because some teachers were racist you know one teacher called me a dorky it was unbelievable and one teacher said oh you know we're doing a dance for the school show called the black bottom and this teacher said to me I thought you people had it in your blood Jacqueline can you not get these steps right I thought you people had it in your blood and I thought god what does that mean you people have it in your blood but it was one of those kind of memorable expressions.

14:39Jackie Kay:Wow it's so so heavy isn't it we talk a lot on the podcast about this word belonging but what does something like that do to your sense of belonging in terms of you know you realize that you're you look different to a lot of the people around you. You're adopted, you know, so that's already challenging your sense of belonging as well. You're growing up in Scotland, I suppose. I'm interested to know sort of what did that do to your sense of Scottishness, your sense of belonging to your community? How did you feel about all of that? I think that as a child, I belonged to my mum and dad. So I felt very much that I belonged in that family.

15:18I loved them, you know, so much and I felt loved so much and I do feel that the first thing that I would have to say to anybody about belonging is that love informs your sense of identity more than anything else so if you're walking down an ordinary street and you look into people's faces you can kind of almost get a sense of the people that feel loved and the people that don't and so that's the first the first thing about identity and belonging to me is is love is a sense of being loved and a sense of your own self-worth because love gives you a sense of self-worth so I had that in abundance and it's really just as well because I needed it because just about an awful lot of other things didn't and so and I had very good friends as well but my friends you know if I'd be walking down the street and somebody would call me you know they had all these chants that they did and that's so hazel and that's Cadbury's take them and they cover you in chocolate or you know what do you call two darkies in a sleeping bag twix or what do you call a darkie falling from the top of a mountain chocolate drop so they'd all run after you and shout all of these things and sometimes actually just try and beat you up but my friends if I'd be with them they just wouldn't say anything they would be embarrassed so they wouldn't even acknowledge that it happened and that was a strange thing and I would be embarrassed because it was happening in front of a friend so I'd be more focused on being embarrassed because I belonged to my friend and this thing happening suddenly ruptured that than there would be about the actual thing itself so that's that was an interesting childhood thing and that goes quite a wee bit back but then as I grew into being a teenager and went to high school I much preferred high school and didn't feel the same level of of stuff so it was the opposite from what most people get most people are comfortable at primary school and then not so much at high school but for me it was the other way around I think because also I got to specialize in subjects and I was that was better for me and I took up running and became a Scottish school girl championship runner and was very sporty and did a lot of drama and so all of these things made me feel that I was developing a sense of who I was and I wrote a lot I started writing when I was 12 that also gave me a sense of identity but in terms of feeling like Scotland I always felt at odds with my country and really it took me to becoming the macker which I wasn't until my 50s macker to feel like I properly belonged to my country because people would always stop you, despite your accent, despite your mannerisms, despite your language, despite your knowledge, despite your everything.

17:47They would ask you where you were from all the time. And they would think that they wouldn't actually hear how you spoke because they were so busy focusing on how you look. So they say, are you over from America, dear? And things like that. And so that would happen so much. I could write an entire book of different incidents. You know, I was in a shop in Drummond once and that place is spelt dry men but it's pronounced drimmen lots of dry men about in drimmen though and i was in this shop and trying on this top and this woman came up to me and she said that color suits you dear where are you from and i said i'm from glasgow and she said is that right because i've got a friend from the dominican republic and so she didn't mean any harm And my son had it made in a T-shirt for me that year as a Christmas present.

18:38In the front it said, I've got a friend from the Dominican Republic. On the back it said, what have you got? And then he took me as a surprise holiday to the Dominican Republic. And then once we got to the Dominican Republic, everybody thought that we were both Dominican. And he speaks fluent Spanish. So he said, Mum, there's another end to that story. And that was really interesting.

19:00Jackie Kay:That's so great. you mentioned there that through your work you found some sort of belonging or acceptance um you know to explain to those that people maybe don't know it's a sort of the scottish equivalent of the poet laureate isn't it yeah the macker is the national poet of scotland yeah why do you think that changed your sense of scottishness out of interest i mean some of it's absurd but i may as well tell the truth because i'm speaking to you and you you're kind of so good you're so good you get the truth out of people somehow so you're so good at what you do I'm a great admirer oh thank you and I just love the yeah I love all the different interests that you have and all the different ways of approaching home I find it really stimulating and interesting but yeah I think that I felt that the whole country belonged to me in a way so if I'd go to Lewis or Harris or Mull or Arden or Merkin or Arden or De Vries and Galloway or the Highlands or whatever I think this is my country I'm the national point of this country and so that never stopped being exciting but also in these places people would turn out for me in huge numbers and then all sorts of different people would get would get to here so I remember being on the ferry in Binbecula and this man helping me with my luggage and he said to me am I right in thinking that you're your macker and I said I am your macker and I felt like it gave me special powers or something and then you turn you turn up in the Isle of Uist for instance and the whole place would be packed out and people sitting up on stairs and um and I said to the woman that was driving me around the next day she was in her like middle 70s I said to her I was surprised last night to see the big lesbian turn out for me and she said without missing a beat she said I will manage to hang own to our lesbians we lose our gay men they all going back to the mainland and so I felt like all of me was accepted I felt like that people knew that I was a lesbian people and people kind of took great pleasure in having and I was a very loved macker I'm not being immodest to say that I'm just being truthful that I was very loved as a macker so I felt that yes all these people suddenly were there and suddenly accepted that I was Scottish and it seemed ridiculous that it should take that length of time and it should take I mean not every black Scottish person can become the national poet and I know I've got lots of black Scottish friends now who have all different experiences of feeling that way and so I do feel that Scotland still needs to do a lot of work on itself as a country in terms of being inclusive and welcoming diversity but it's a huge amount better than it was when I was growing up.

21:43And as far as attitudes to sexuality goes, it's actually one of the most progressive countries in the whole of Europe. And that's like, you know, I fled Scotland as a young lesbian, ran down to England because it just didn't feel like a friendly country. And now it is, and now it's changed quite a lot. So I think these are interesting questions because, you know, when you're asking about home, you know, we can answer these questions personally about, you know, mugs and glasses and tables and taste and all of the rest of it. I found Alan's conversation with you totally fascinating.

22:18Jackie Kay:Oh, Alan de Botton, yeah. Yeah, I thought he was fascinating. But you can also answer in the sense of, you know, home is a country, home is a set of values, home is politics, home is how your governments run, home is your sense of how your country's operating in the world, home is your sense of pride at the Charter and Army and the World Cup, for instance, but not necessarily at the footballers themselves. Whoops, take that bit out. But anyway, you know, and they're almost being inspired by people that you feel are from a similar place to you, acting in the world in a way that you feel is wonderful.

22:53So, for instance, Ken Muir Street, when the people of Ken Muir Street in Glasgow stopped, two people being taken out of the country. I don't know if you've seen the film, Ken Muir Street. It's really amazing. I just felt a surge of pride at the Glaswegians that got out in the street to fight against racism and at the kind of organisation that they had. And of Glasgow itself, I feel enormously proud of me. I'm just back from Glasgow. I just had to write a love letter to Glasgow that will be used for the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony. so I've just finished that now and it made me realise how intertwined my relationship with Glasgow and being a Glas region is to my notions of home.

23:36Jackie Kay:So interesting. And you've settled now in Manchester, is that right? Yes, yes. People don't like it in Scotland. Scottish people don't like it when you live in England. She lives down south now. There's terrible judgement about it. She's like, oh, fuck off.

23:57quite right he should have been friendlier to me then years ago years ago

24:05Jackie Kay:well the good thing is it sounds like the relationship's come a long way but um you're in manchester why manchester well i lived in london for 20 years before that and then uh you know i have a son and my then partner carol ann duffy had a daughter and we both looked at schools for them and where we were living in London we didn't like the schools so we liked the schools in Manchester so we moved to Manchester I still wanted to live in a multicultural city I wouldn't have brought my son up in Scotland because there was no city and then he's 37 now but there was no city then that felt as if he would just be you know he could have lots of black friends and teachers and whatever and I really don't think and this is a shocking thing to say I really don't think he'd be the man that he is in the world if I'd brought him up in Scotland yeah yeah there's a term that sociologists use called elective belonging and it's this idea that some of us grow up in a place and we feel like we really belong to that place and we kind of spend our whole lives there and that's sort of that's actually a really nice way to be but most of us don't have that experience most of us actually have to kind of pick somewhere that we think is hopefully going to work for us and put down roots there and and they call it elective belonging and they've they've proven actually it's just as powerful as being traditionally rooted in a place if you can find a community that you feel reflects your values understands who appreciates you do you feel that you found that there yeah I do I live in a really fantastic community in Charlton in Manchester yes there's probably more more vegan lesbians per square mile than there are or just about as many as there are in Hebsen Bridge.

25:48Not that I'm a vegan lesbian. But yeah, there's a great kind of book reading community and a great artistic community. It has its own book festival, its own art festival. People look after its park, Beach Road Park. It's got a huge kind of nature reserve right just down the road from me. It's got Beach Road, which I live just off Beach Road and every shop on that road is practically an independent shop and they all support each other. and yeah at one point I was thinking of moving away from Charlton and my son told his friend about this, Rijay, he told Rijay that I was going to be moving away from Charlton and Rijay went

26:27Jackie Kay:but Jackie is Charlton and I was so chuffed at that, I was so touched at that that I've stayed but no I was really kind of chuffed at that because yeah loads of people know you and And so it feels really friendly, but at the same time, you've got enough space, I suppose, to be yourself. Yeah, I'm really pleased to hear it. I'd love to pivot to your book, Red Dust Road, which is basically where you set out to find your biological parents. What do you think you are hoping to find and why did you set out on that mission? Well, I'd already found my birth mother when I was 26 and I was pregnant with my son.

27:07and that I found such a traumatic and upsetting experience, I decided that I wouldn't try and find my birth father ever. And then aged 42, I was invited to Nigeria to do a tour as a writer for the British Council. And I thought, well, I'm going to my father's country. It seems strange not to try and find him. And so my birth mother had told me his name and I did know that he was a leading academic. academic and so I was at some conference or something in France and this academic said to me well if if he's an academic he'll have papers you just need to type his name into a search engine and he'll come up and I thought oh my god I can't believe that I hadn't even thought of that so I did that and he did come up and the phone number came up and so yeah my partner Caroline at the time she called him and got right through and so that was really interesting that He was a leading ethnobotanist and a world tree specialist.

28:05And it was bizarre that I was chasing my family tree and found this tree specialist father. And that's really what led me to reading, writing and Red Dust Road. That led me straight to writing a memoir, which I never would have thought I would try and try that form. But it just seemed that the truth is stranger than fiction often. That cliche is true. And that when your life becomes a story that's happening to you, all you can do if you're a writer is try and write it down. in a way, in order to understand it and in order to face some of the things that are challenging and difficult.

28:39Jackie Kay:So you made contact with him, and then what happened? He came to meet me in Abuja. I didn't know what he'd look like. I'd never seen a picture of him. I had all these fantasies from my mum, because my mum always liked to try and imagine my birth father. I'm picturing a Paul Robeson figure, Jackie, maybe with a bit of Nelson Mandela mixed in, she'd say, and things like that. So I always said this tall man. Anyway, so he was very different to how I'd visually imagined him. And he was wearing a long white African dress. He was smaller in height than me. And he was carrying a plastic bag. And he said to me, can we go straight away to your hotel room?

29:17So we went straight to my room. He didn't hug me. He didn't anything. He just wanted to go. He seemed like to have a mission that we had to get to this hotel room. And so that was odd because I took him to my hotel room and he was my father. but he was also a complete stranger so it seemed really bizarre but anyway and then he got out the Bible from his plastic bag and he proceeded to give me a two and a half hour sermon singing and dancing and clapping around me and clapping and praying and he had his bare feet moving around and I noticed at one point in the middle of this sermon that he had the same feet as me but at another point in the middle of this sermon I realised that he was actually trying to cleanse me and that he saw me as his past sin and so then that became very disturbing and he didn't want to tell any of his friends or family.

30:07He'd come in secret, he hadn't told his wife, he hadn't told his children and he didn't want to tell me anything about his children, not even what sexes they were, you know, he just didn't want to. He said, if people were to know about you, they would lose their faith in God, which seems like a big statement to make and also an incredible power to have.

30:27Jackie Kay:Okay, wow. So you had that experience in the hotel room with him and then what? Did you go your separate ways after that or what happened then? No, then we went to eat outside in the hotel, outside bar sort of thing. And he ordered some soup and I ordered something to eat. And I ordered a bottle of wine, knocked back a glass in one single cup. And he had a little bit of wine with me, even though his religion is not to drink. He said, what percentage of alcohol is this? About 4%. So I lied and thinking that he might be more fun with the drink than him. So I said, yeah, about 4%. And so he had a drink and he was having done his sermon and having done what he wanted to do, he seemed to relax.

31:11And then he was nice. He was really good company. I know he was interesting, but that was the only time I met him. And then he was kind of, he said, so you said in your letter that you didn't want to answer to a man and you're not married. so if you're not married and you do not have a boyfriend or such how do you cater with your sex drive he said to me which seemed like which seemed a really kind of unfatherly question to ask and I said well um the woman that you spoke to on the telephone she's my partner and he said how so and I said well she's my partner we've been together for 15 years and he went oh you mean you're a lesbian and I said yes that's right I'm a lesbian and he went okay okay okay okay okay okay

31:57Jackie Kay:okay okay which one of you is the man your life story is is unbelievably fascinating Jackie thank you for sharing all that I mean so that was the was that the only proper time you spent with him then you said yeah I tried to seven years later I decided that I was just accepting that he wouldn't let me meet my brothers or sisters or whatever I knew that he had four children he told me he had four and each time I tried to find out something about them on that single meeting he'd say Jackie K Jackie K digging again digging again I quite like that because I am a digger and I thought oh yeah he's got that right that made me feel known for a brief moment I felt a rush of love I felt a rush of love for him.

32:41And it is a funny thing because, you know, yeah, you are actual relative strangers. But then I thought, you know, I was invited to Nigeria again for a second time, but this time from my friend Chumamanda Ngozi Adichie to go and do a writing workshop and do some readings. And all my Nigerian friends didn't think that it was acceptable. They said it wasn't the Nigerian way, how my father was, and he wasn't behaving as he, you know, that all Nigerians have to recognise your blood and that's what you do and they say ancestral home and you have to know where your ancestral home is you can't be denied these things and so I was I was with a whole load of people that were like getting really wound up on my behalf and therefore kind of winding me up and then we had a kind of stroke of luck where we worked out that a friend of Chimamandas had actually been to university with who must have been my brother Emeka and we found we found him and we found through a series of coincidences the other brother.

33:37And so just as I was about to leave Nigeria, I met that brother. But before then, I also found out where the ancestral home was and I went to visit it without anybody there. It's always complicated trying to find out stuff about yourself. I mean, for anybody that's done this, it's just because you almost become a private investigator in your own life and you're putting together clues that buzz with significance for you. and but then I went to his ancestral village and there was nobody to welcome me and then I went to the market there and all the people in that part of Nigeria and eastern Nigeria were dark dark black so somebody my colour was quite unusual and the friend that I was with the man called Kashi was kind of quite protective of me and worried that I was going to get kidnapped and everything and then suddenly these women in the marketplace started going oi boi boi boi boi and I turned to Cassian was quite excited and I said oh they can recognize in my face that my father was an Igbo and I thought you know because they were all Igbo and I felt really excited that they could see in my face that I was an Igbo and Cassian looked really embarrassed and he went Jackie Igbo is a pigeon word for a white woman so that was really kind of awful and really devastating and and it was the first time in my life that I actually felt mixed race because I always just defined myself as black and Scottish I didn't like mixed race didn't like half cast I didn't like all these different terms.